Buffalo Landscape Design: On Process

From Robert Irwin Getty Garden (2002):

I've been spending more time with this garden book than any other for the last couple weeks. Thank you Claire. Thank you Buffalo and Erie County Library.

I came across a nice quote in the transcribed interview represented in the book. I feel it fits into the frame of thinking about Art -vs- Craft. 

Robert Irwin, the Landscape Architect on the project, is asked by his interviewer Lawrence Weschler: "Looking at this specific instance here [discussing the plant palette and color], what did you plan?"

Irwin answers: "I didn't plan anything. I found a number of plants I really liked that had different kinds of compatibilities, different kinds of overlaps. Some overlapped in terms of scale, some overlapped in terms of color, some overlapped in terms of texture, some overlapped in terms of structure. You find these overlapping capabilities and then you compose them together so that they act and interact and relate to each other."

Shortly thereafter Irwin says: "When an artist says, 'It feels right,' people think, well, that's just some kind of out-of-the-blue, sort of intuitive statement...[but the artist over a career] starts out with a concept and he sets out a kind of hypothesis and he has a strategy and he then does a process of trial and error. He's got an idea where he thinks its going to go, and he tries this and he tries that, and he writes it down. This  

one will work. This one didn't work. This is one reaction, whereas this one: nothing happened. Every now and then he might make a discovery along the way, if he was paying attention. So that after he's done ten-thousand of them, you say "oh, my God, he discovered this thing, and this is how he did it."
                                                    (p63-64)

I liked this point of the interview because it acknowledges the past work and experience of the designer/architect. In one sense, he's an artist - but not an artist in that there is some raw spiritual force that flows primitively from his soul - an artist in that he has spent a lifetime considering the finest and most minuscule of tactile phenomena.

To one person, it appears as something that "feels right," but this is only after feeling so many times that you also know what feels not right.  

Irwin's opening here, "I didn't plan anything," sounds great, but then he goes on to describe the planning process, how he assembled together a number of plants with compatabilities and overlaps. Assembly of a plant list is planning.             (February 2014)

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http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Irwin-Garden-Lawrence-Weschler/dp/0892366206/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394481794&sr=8-1&keywords=Robert+Irwin+Getty+Garden